Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas—Carroll Pursell, Ed. (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2018, 3rd ed., 360 pp.)

Abstract

Reading the 26 essays of this well-regarded book now in its third edition was such a pleasurable experience that I wanted to teach a course in which I might assign it to my students. The text would be of particular interest to engineering students—it is about their profession—as well as of interest to people in the field of the history of technology. The main strength of the work is its sometimes novel choice of topics. Its occasional weakness is the failure of some important subjects to appear. Historians of technology will recognize some familiar names in the list of essayists. Merritt Roe Smith writes about Eli Whitney’s role in the American system of manufacturing and demolishes the notion that Whitney pioneered manufacturing with interchangeable parts. Thomas Parke Hughes writes on Thomas Edison, and Ruth Schwartz Cowan on Ellen Swallow Richards, in 1870, the first woman to graduate from MIT and the driving force behind the establishment of the discipline of home economics.